How Much Is My Substack Worth? The Valuation Formula, Explained

The short answer

A paid Substack newsletter is typically worth 2x to 5x its annual revenue. A publication earning $100,000 a year usually sells somewhere between $200,000 and $500,000. Where you land inside that range is decided mostly by churn, then by growth rate, audience quality, and how much the publication depends on you personally.

That is the whole formula in one sentence. The rest of this piece is about the second half of it — because the gap between 2x and 5x is the difference between $200,000 and $500,000 on the same revenue, and that gap is where all the real money is.

Why revenue multiples, and not subscriber counts

Writers tend to think in subscribers. Buyers think in revenue. A 100,000-subscriber free list with no paid tier is worth far less than a 900-subscriber paid list at $15 a month, because only one of them has proven that people will pay.

This is why per-subscriber rules of thumb are misleading. The number that matters is annual recurring revenue, and the multiple applied to it is a judgment about how durable that revenue is. Everything below is really a statement about durability.

Churn is the single biggest lever

Churn decides how long the revenue a buyer is purchasing actually lasts, which makes it the most heavily weighted input in almost any newsletter valuation.

The math is unforgiving. At 7% monthly churn, the average subscriber sticks around about 14 months. At 1.5%, they stay about 67 months — nearly five times longer. A buyer purchasing the second business is buying five years of a relationship; a buyer purchasing the first is buying just over one. They will not pay the same multiple, and they should not.

If you are planning to sell in the next couple of years, cutting churn is worth more than adding subscribers. It compounds into the multiple itself rather than just into this year's revenue line.

• Below 2% monthly churn: exceptional, and priced as such.
• Around 3% to 4%: normal for a healthy paid newsletter.
• Above 6%: a buyer will discount hard, or walk.

Where your readers live changes what they are worth

Two newsletters with identical revenue are not identically valuable if one list is concentrated in high-income markets and the other is not.

This is not about the revenue you have today — a subscriber pays the same USD price wherever they live. It is about what happens next. A high-income list absorbs price increases better, commands higher sponsorship rates, and is less exposed to currency moves and discretionary-spending shocks. Buyers price that forward risk.

The honest version of this adjustment is a dampened one. Weighting your paid list by GDP per capita against a US benchmark gets you a directional signal, but applying it at full strength would be wrong, since it would discount revenue you are already reliably collecting. Our calculator dampens it heavily for exactly this reason, and lets you turn it down further if you disagree.

Niche, priced the way the market already prices it

An AI newsletter and a recipe newsletter with the same revenue do not fetch the same multiple. Rather than inventing a ranking of which topics are fashionable, the cleanest approach is to read it off the public markets, which price categories all day long.

Compare the price-to-sales ratio of the listed sector closest to your topic against the market as a whole. Information technology trades at a large premium to the index; consumer staples and energy trade at a discount. Finance sits modestly above. That relative spread is a reasonable proxy for how much appetite there is for exposure to your category.

As with geography, the raw spread is far too wide to apply directly — sectors can differ by 8x, and no one thinks a cooking newsletter is worth an eighth of an AI one. Dampen it, and let it tilt the number rather than decide it.

Scale and growth: the two things that move the multiple up

Larger businesses sell for higher multiples. There is less key-person risk, more institutional buyers able to write the cheque, and more of an actual operation to acquire rather than one person's habit. The effect is roughly logarithmic — each 10x of revenue adds a step, rather than scaling linearly.

Growth works the same way but faster. A buyer is purchasing next year's revenue, not last year's. A list still compounding at 3% a month is on a very different trajectory from a flat one at the same size, and gets paid for it.

These are the two factors most within your control on a 12-month horizon, and the two most worth optimising before a conversation with a buyer.

What the model cannot see

Every valuation model, including ours, is blind to the thing that most often decides a newsletter sale: whether the audience follows the writer or the publication.

If readers subscribed for your voice, the business does not fully transfer, and sophisticated buyers know it. Publications with a distinct editorial identity, a repeatable format, or multiple contributors survive the handover far better than a one-person column does. This is why some newsletters sell at 5x and structurally identical ones struggle to clear 2x.

Sponsorship concentration is the other blind spot. Revenue that depends on three advertiser relationships you personally maintain is worth less than the same revenue spread across a thousand subscribers, even though both show up identically in ARR.

Estimate your own number

We built a calculator that runs this whole model: base revenue multiple, adjusted for audience GDP per capita, sector price-to-sales, churn, scale, and growth — with weight sliders on every factor so you can dial out any adjustment you disagree with.

It also shows the distribution rather than a single figure, because a valuation is a range and anyone who gives you one number is selling you something.

Value your newsletter

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